Figure 1.

A schematic overview of a niche/occurrence mapping process (for example boosted regression trees (BRT)) that uses pseudo-absence data guided by expert opinion. Consensus based definitive extent layers of infectious disease occurrence at the national level (a) are combined with accurately geo-positioned occurrence (presence) locations (b) to generate pseudo-absence data (c). The presence (b) and pseudo-absence data (c) are then used in the BRT analyses, alongside a suite of environmental covariates (d) to predict the probability of occurrence of the target disease (e).